Gaza has remained trapped in a cycle that looks less like history and more like paralysis. What began as a temporary refuge for Palestinians displaced by the wars surrounding Israel’s creation has hardened into a vast, permanent settlement.
Generations have grown up within its walls under the label of “refugee,” a word that was never meant to describe a people for so long.
The world’s institutions, particularly the United Nations, have administered this condition for decades—not solving it, but sustaining it. The result is a political and humanitarian stalemate that benefits no one. Those born in Gaza deserve a life beyond dependency and despair. Yet the region’s politics have turned their suffering into a symbol—a tool wielded by competing sides to prove opposing points about justice, resistance, and survival.
After the violence of October 7, 2023, it became impossible to discuss Gaza without confronting the fear that drives Israeli society. The scale and brutality of that attack revived an old truth: proximity without trust is combustible. Israel, already deeply scarred, now sees the Gaza Strip not just as a neighbor in need but as a constant threat.
The moral dilemma is stark. How does a state protect itself without hardening its heart to civilians next door? How do Palestinians demand dignity without turning that struggle into nihilism? The tragedy is that each act of violence confirms the other side’s worst beliefs.
At the surface, the conflict appears territorial—about land, checkpoints, and sovereignty. But beneath that lies a deeper, more corrosive argument about identity and belief. In parts of the Islamic world, the question of Israel’s existence is bound to theology: the idea that Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem is intolerable. Yet in Israel, religion also feeds a sense of divine entitlement to the same ground.
This fusion of faith and politics ensures that every concession looks like betrayal, every compromise like heresy. History is rewritten through scripture, and modern grievances are recast as ancient prophecy. That is why peace plans collapse so quickly: they address borders, not convictions.
There is another uncomfortable reality. The modern concept of “Palestine” is as much a political creation as a historical one. It emerged in response to displacement—a nation born out of loss. That does not make it illegitimate; most nations are, in one way or another, reactions to power. But it does mean that Palestinian identity has been shaped largely in opposition—to Israel, to occupation, and to betrayal by neighboring Arab states that offered rhetoric instead of refuge.
Across the Middle East, many governments have used the Palestinian question as a moral shield, deflecting criticism of their own systems while refusing to integrate Palestinian refugees. The result is an identity suspended between belonging and rejection—too political for Arab assimilation, too rooted for erasure.
After nearly a hundred years of confrontation, the fundamental question is not who owns the land, but whether coexistence is still imaginable. Can two peoples so defined by mutual trauma ever learn to see survival not as a zero-sum game but as shared necessity?
The twentieth century offered the world many ideological conflicts that eventually burned out. This one persists because it is fed by memory and faith—and because both sides see themselves as victims of history.
If Gaza’s endless tragedy teaches anything, it is that political solutions mean little when identity itself remains the battlefield. Until that deeper reckoning occurs—within religions, within nations, within memory—borders will continue to shift, but peace will remain out of reach.
